4. Professor Towlin

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Hello guys, it has been quite the break from this here blog but I’m glad to inform you that I finally found my muse. I don’t know how long this visit will be but I intend to make the very best of it.

This story is a continuation of the ArchAndroid series and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it!!

Creating Cindi was the most perfect thing, to borrow an old phrase, ‘the stars aligned’ to make her.

She was the culmination of all my work – 20 cyborg series and billions in Metroliies as well as having to deal with annoying interns. It was easier when Indira was alive; she ran my office and kept the greenhorns in check.

My darling Indira, she was my muse. I remember the first time the idea of creating a humanoid crossed my mind. I was sitting at this new restaurant Axxa that had opened across the street from my laboratory. It was owned by Lady Maxxa, a younger socialite whose popularity baffled me – you know, famous for being famous? But I digress.

As I sat at my table trying to resolve the conundrum that was my main course, she walked in, my Indira. She had come with friends for a party of sorts. Well more like she’d been dragged there and it showed. She had a small ornate forehead decoration common with Bharatiens and beautiful long hair. Our eyes only met for a second before she was dragged to the party booth by her friend.

That night I had trouble sleeping, in my mind, I had met a goddess, maybe Lakshmi. I was obsessed for several weeks penning designs based on her beauty and my impression of her in those few seconds. Metropolis had advanced considerably in the cyborg department but Bioroid science was relatively new – lots of research, a few hypotheses and many failed tests, some mine, were all that made up Bioroid Science in 2685. I was not discouraged however and worked many nights refining theories to recreate my wonderful daydream.

Needless to say I didn’t get out much normally.

I was the only child of deceased ‘world traveller’ parents whose fortune came from the sale and stock holdings of their company Norwlan Corp., a semiconductor manufacturing company that had expanded to include trent tubes – a core component of every cyborg. My parents had had enough of the corporate life and sold everything to tour the world. I had just completed my master’s degree and my friends and I were off to Luka’s home in Tysklein for the holiday. I was given control of the family’s finances and they were off.I was back at home and a few months into my PhD. Program when I got the news they had died – it was a rough 9 months following that. I buried myself deep into my studies and temporarily ceded control of all business to the family lawyer. I became a recluse and spent those months testing and re-testing theories in Bioroid Science.

It was shortly after emerging from that self-spun cocoon that I first saw my Indira and consequently my first foray into the more intangible aspects of Bioroid development – creating a soul.

I took a trip to the Bharati regions to understand more about the soul from their culture. They were one of the few societies who had preserved some form of religion into the Neo – Pangaea era and although a lot of it was tourist fodder, I had Bharatien classmates who had assured me that if I searched long enough, I would find true temples that taught the principles of religion and the origin of man.

It took me two months to sort the true Brahmin descendants, the priests from the phonies. I eventually got a meeting with a Pandit, a scholar – to hold in two weeks.

So I decided to take a tour of the temples in the region and try out this ‘soul-searching’ they claimed was mandatory to ‘understand oneself’. So I wandered through temples, took pictures and stopped once in a while to scribble down any ‘wisdom’ I got regards the nature of the soul. It was during one of such bouts of wisdom I saw her again. She was seated at the other end of the tea house with a younger-looking lady talking – she was even more beautiful than I remembered. I decided then I would marry her. As sappy as it sounds, I wanted her calm and love and to treat her like the queen I felt she was. So I summoned the courage to speak to her. As I walked across, I tripped and fell on my side right next to her table. The spare seating cushion broke my fall thankfully and after making sure I was alright and pouring me some tea she laughed out loud and mentioned something about how I looked like a tree being felled. We laughed more and her companion, her sister Lakshmi joined in. We sat there for an hour or so talking when Lakshmi had to leave to go to meet her husband at his shop. Indira and I stayed and talked so long, the tea room hostess came to tell us she was closing. We strolled on by the boulevard and she asked to stop at a temple to pray I followed her in and shared silence while she prayed to Ganesha.

It was my Indira who accompanied me two weeks later to see the Pandit. Turns out she was quite the master in Cyborg research and had only recently ventured into Bioroid Science as a curiosity.

In the room with the wooden floor with one wall open to the lush garden, the Pandit began his teaching of the origin of the soul to us. With Indira’s hand in mine, the beginnings of what would be Android 57821 in another 30 years began to fall into place.